With our recent Move92 grant, we worked with 24 female business owners Isla del Sol, Isla de la Luna (Lake Titikaka), and La Paz and El Alto.

These women ran hostels, grocery stores, handicraft businesses, artisanal food (like coffee, wine and smoked meat), fashion boutiques, organic greenhouses and local family restaurants. No business was exactly the same, but all of their businesses had suffered during the pandemic.

We did an audit of their branding materials, redesigned their logos and materials (depending on what they needed), and built promotional kits for their communications and social media. You can see a link to our work below.

We then did group trainings on social media and promotions—bringing this group of women together for two separate weekends to meet other small business owners and share ideas.

This project sounds simple, but it was very powerful in taking these women to another level of professionalism.

And the weekend encounters allowed them to meet each other and network in a way they rarely (if ever) get to do—especially the women living in rural areas.

With our recent Move92 grant, we conducted an interview-based research project. We wanted to understand the needs of our refugee and asylum seeker population more deeply, and to see where the gaps in services are.

We were also looking for places we could collaborate with other organizations who serve our refugees and asylum seekers.

We interviewed all residents of The Duniya House (which houses men, women and families) and did face-to-face interviews of families living in urban squats. We also did phone interviews of several people in the refugee camps.

Our questions asked about current living situations, basic needs that are or aren’t being met and organizations that have been helpful along the way (medical, legal, food assistance, education and others). These were personal interviews done in each person’s native language. We spent time understanding the unique aspects of each person’s situation.

We are still compiling the data, but several clear trends are emerging.

Every year, ASOGEN receives around 300 new cases of violence against adolescent girls and women both from the department of Chimaltenango and from Sacatepéquez (in addition to some 300 cases that are followed up from previous years).
With our recent Move92 grant, we paid the salary of a new lawyer to our team for a full year. Our team has expanded because our coverage area is expanding.

We have an office in the center of Chimaltenango, but as part of our expansion strategy, we opened an office in Antigua to cover all Sacatepéquez department. We also opened a new office in Antigua to attend the women in the municipia’s of Patricia, Zaragoza, Pathum in Chimaltenango and Jocotenango, Pastores and San Lucas in Sacatepéquez.

We want to be able to offer our services to women closer to where they live.

Here is a video that highlights our work:

For our most recent Move92 grant, we set the stage for planning a National Day for the Survivors of War and Genocide.

This was a collaboration with CONAVIGUA (The National Coordination of Widows from Guatemala) an organization founded in 1988 in the face of forced disappearances, militarization, and genocide of the Mayan people.

We conducted a strategy session to reflect, analyze and prepare for this day of honor with 80 participants. These participants were mostly young people—the daughters and sons of the disappeared men and women.

We also provided food, medicinal plants and seeds to allies from Chimaltenango, San Martin Jilotepeque and Comalapa—using that opportunity to talk about the importance of food sovereignty.

Our work culminated with 2 workshops with young people in Comalapa on memory and history.

Here is a video that describes how we work (and why):

MAIA’s Impact School is Central America’s first secondary school for indigenous girls specifically designed to unlock and maximize their potential to lead transformational change.

And we are already “proving the concept.” We are among just a handful of organizations of this size that is led and run by Mayan women from the communities it serves.

With our recent Move92 grant, we thought we would be focusing on creating relationships with private sector leaders to identify opportunities
for MAIA graduates, and focusing on the digital literacy skills of our graduates.

Then COVID hit. We pivoted and used the grant for staff salaries and school utilities, but our Girl Pioneers continued to demonstrate their ingenuity.

Specifically, our Girl Pioneers set up community libraries and hygiene stations in their towns (while schools were shut-down), identified 270 of the most vulnerable households in their communities and set up a program to deliver food support to those who need it most, and launched a family garden pilot program to model how each family could address many nutritional needs through small-plot organic gardening during the pandemic.

Since then, 100 more families have been trained on how to plant their own gardens to sustainably address food insecurity. (Guatemala already experiences the highest levels of chronic malnutrition in the Western Hemisphere).

Here is a video that shares some of the importance of what we do:

We have trained more than 5,500 youth, and 100 multi-lingual trainers with sustainability and leadership competencies.

This movement has created hundreds of community action plans, impacting over 90,000 people, planting more than 36,000 trees, holding 40 community forums, implementing 15 community gardens, and many more actions that mobilize their community for change.

With our recent Move92 grant, we funding conference travel, staff training, small grants for youth action plans, general operating expenses (e.g. social media), legal services to establish our subsidiary in El Salvador, and regional travel.

Few people invest in “overhead” like this, but it creating impact and social change requires much more time than you would give a “normal job”, so investing in the people of our team is essential. We have to make opportunities for our staff to co-learn and co-create together, constantly training our leaders to keep up with innovation worldwide.

Here is a video about our work:

Since 2001, we have reached 315,495 youth, women and men, and have prevented 286,625 unintended pregnancies. We offer services in 14 out of 22 departments (departments are similar to US States).

Each month, we provide an average of 20 pop-up clinics that provide long-acting reversiblecontraception (and surgical contraceptive procedures) throughout 10 departments. Our two mobile units have to travelup to 8 hours to reach rural communities over rough terrain. And the trucks we had were in constant need of repair.

We used our Move92 grant to help purchase a new mobile services unit truck. The vehicle was stenciled, fully retrofitted with equipment, and has been used to travel to pop-up clinic sites throughout Alta Verapaz, Chimaltenango,Escuintla, Quiché, Retalhuleu, Sacatepéquez, Santa Rosa, Sololá, Suchitepéquez, and Totonicapán.

A schedule of our pop-up clinics can be viewed online at www.wingsguate.org/jornadas.

If you’d like to learn more about what we do, here is a video describing our work:

Over 1 million people in Guatemala identify as ethnically Maya Kaqchikel. WJI is proud to have been able to reach over 57,000 Kaqchikel-speaking individuals so far, but we are not ready to stop there.

Our Community Advocates are one element of our program that makes it successful. These are women who ensure the sustainability of WJI’s work by becoming leaders, women’s rights educators, and mentors to their peers.

These advocates multiply WJI’s impact by promoting gender equality in their communities and by accompanying women seeking legal services through the process. Our work would not be possible without them.

With our recent Move92 grant, …… TO BE FINISHED

Here is an overview of our work:

Our willingness to always look outside the box has enabled us to open and operate 39 Women’s Schools for Peace and 10 Peace Leaders and Girls Ambassadors for Peace groups.

We also lead the Working Group on Women and Countering Violent Extremism, which aims to strengthen gender perspectives in preventing/countering violent extremism.

Our most recent Move92 grant allowed us to create the film, She Builds Peace:Mind Her Story, Lead the Change, Shape the Future”, a documentary on how women contribute significantly to conflict prevention and peacebuilding in the conflict-affected community. The project is linked to global #shebuildpeace campaign led by ICAN.

But equally important was the outreach to the younger generation, so we created a talk show-style podcast, where our country director, Ruby Kholifah, invites grassroots peacebuilders from diverse backgrounds and regions in Indonesia to talk about the nuances of their work.

We have worked hard to launch this campaign on social media (Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter) with the goal of creating alternative narratives against conservative and radical messaging that discredit women—and sending more positive messages to a younger, more connected audience.

Our Instagram with videos is here:

Rapidly advancing internet technologies have a significant impact on privacy rights. The practice of using data for AI, big data, and other development trends have become common, but we see the absence of gender and feminist perspective in the issue of privacy in Indonesia. The internet is still seen through a male-dominated lens.

Even so, teenagers are hungry for information on how to stay safe online as rapidly advancing technology penetrates our lives. We recently hosted Digital Security & Girls Leadership Academy that sold out with 35 in attendance and a waiting list. We are currently planning a series of workshops and creating a Privacy Handbook to help girls & women and non-binary people know how to protect their rights to privacy in a digital society.

Our most recent grant allowed the Purple Code Collective to hire new staff, and host an all-team retreat. This retreat allowed the team to take a step back, breathe, and develop some longer-term strategy. With these new staff, we were able to conduct surveys, publish books on Gender & Privacy and OBGV, recruit and train members or an OGBV taskforce, and host teaching sessions and webinars.

We had to give up our physical space during COVID, but here is a Short Video about us.

The leadership staff at Paamoja grew up here in Mathare. We have been away for our education, but have returned to make sure our young people have the information and skills they need. Giving back is something we show our young people every day, by example.

Our recent MOVE92 grant funded vital research. Over the years, we have noticed that male facilitators have been more consistent and have performed at a higher level than their female counterparts.

In addition, the data shows that even after supporting both girls and boys to attend the best schools in Kenya, boys transition from high school to post-secondary schools and from post-secondary to the job market at a higher rate than girls do. A spot-check in different community organisations has more men leading the organisations than women.

Interestingly enough, Mathare’s economy is run by women. Approximately, 75% of households are made up of single mothers who mainly sell a traditional brew, Changa’a, and anything that helps to produce it including sugar, firewood, water and other necessary ingredients.

Women basically run their families, their businesses and the community at large. But they aren’t in leadership positions. We wanted to know why this was happening—and more importantly, what to do about it.

Our recent grant funded the development of a qualitative questionnaire, and the work 10 research assistants who led focus group discussions and key informant interviews in 3 wards within Mathare Sub-County. 150 respondents answered the questionnaire and the team interviewed 20 key informants. The data was then shared back with the community. This was an important step that deepens trust.
Our findings and recommendations can be found in the PDF here.
And here is a video about our work:

With our recent Move92 grant, we built a mobile app to address the problem that most small farmers have. Namely, to understand market demand and the farm gate prices of different commodities across different areas.

Here is an example: If a buyer asked how many tons of cabbage the farmers have next week or how many tons can the farmer supply monthly, most of the farmer groups couldn’t make such estimation immediately. The head of the farmers’ group would have needed to gather information from their members first to provide such simple answers to the buyers.

In addition, buyers always want to know the farm gate prices of different commodities in different areas. Without this information being easy to find, farmers were losing opportunities to engage buyers.

Our app is designed to coordinate information between buyers and farmers for crops like bush bean, cabbage, carrot, Chinese cabbage, spring onion, fresh chili, coriander, morning glory, mung bean, amaranth, asparagus, bitter gourd, coffee, tea, sticky rice, black sticky rice, jasmine rice, soybean, cassava, sugarcane, maize, chicken, duck, goat and pig and more. It connects buyers and farmers directly. It has been tested by over 100 farmers and is now in full use.

You can find the app for free on the Apple App Store: LFN Mart

Here is a recent video of our work:

With our recent Move92 grant, we decided to do something unusual. We built a mountain biking Pump Track in the center of our village. It has been very popular. We have kids lining up patiently to wait their turn to ride the track every day after school.

The goal of the pump track (and the Phaplu Mountain Bike Club) is to introduce the young children of Phaplu to the sport of mountain biking, but more importantly, to make riding the Pump Track an incentive to stay in school.

It is working.
We have created a sense of community amongst the kids–girls and boys—and what’s emerging is a gathering place to offer more after-school learning.
The larger vision is to create a new livelihood in our region. Training at the Pump Track and on the trails will expose our young people to the skills to compete professionally, work as mountain biking guides, become mechanics, or even run their own mountain biking tour companies.
As the mountain biking culture and tourism grows in the region, having these skills will open great personal and professional opportunities.

This Pump Track has introduced a new vitality in our village. And we hosted our first mountain biking invitational this past year. It drew people from outsidethis regionas well as international competitors.

Here is a short video, so you can envision it.

We used our most recent Move92 grant to build this program. Specifically, we assembled a leadership team consisting of an MBA, a civil engineer, a psychologist and an economist.

We then recruited our target group of entrepreneurs (20-30 years old) through Facebook & Instagram, word-of-mouth, collaborations with other influencers, and free webinars. We conducted a formal application process and selected candidates.

Our next phase was training. We focused on 3 areas: Leadership, Administration/Finance, and Marketing.

Our workshops were held over 4 weeks, twice a week. And our curriculum included topics like benchmarking, SWOT analysis, design-thinking, basic finance, product pricing, marketing strategies and digital marketing.
Our classes culminated with an extraordinary Job Fair Event when each entrepreneur got to showcase her product. We also invited several industry experts and investors who got to sit down with our entrepreneurs and talk one-on-one about their businesses.

To see photos from our work, see the PDF below.

The community leaders we support are committed to connecting to Ancient wisdom, challenging old patriarchal ideas, and promoting women’s rights to dignity, land, and livelihood.

As the African Solidarity Fund, we offer three things: 1) Direct grants to support their projects,2) In-country networking and organizing to grow their connections, and3) An online platform to encourage solidarity, inter-generational dialogue, and learning across communities.

Our recent Move92 grant allowed us to support two different groups. One a small Khosian community (indigenous) in Namibia. And the other, a small group of young activists in Limpopo province in South Africa.

For the Khosian community, we are giving a grant to help Pops Muhammed (well-known South African musician) create a documentary about the Khosian and why they are so relevant to the global climate crisis we face. This grant will also support the Khoisan youth network to challenge and hopefully stop a Canadian oil company who is drilling in an extremely biodiverse area (a UNESCO world heritage site). This place is also an important spiritual site for the Khoisan.

The grant for the young activists is to support them mapping all of the sacred sites for an area slated for Chinese coal factory development. Their region is extremely biodiverse, has a lot of natural sacred sites, and is next to key rivers. Their work is to counter the South African government and investors who are trying to push economic development in the area, the kinds of development that they have seen lead to the decimation of nature and sickness in surrounding communities.

Our goal is to offer women and girls the opportunity to develop a third path outside of wife and daughter, and to inspire them to contribute their talents to society in new ways.

We offer a residential college prep experience–(academics, arts, sports)–but also a sense of empowerment for personal change and growth. Through a curriculum of group lessons and shared trauma, we take the common self-talk of “What’s wrong with me?” and transform it into “What would I like to do, lead, or create next?”

Our most recent Move92 grant has funded a lot of different initiatives all done to expand our program and reach more young women. We are moving our curriculum and best practices into a Community College setting so we can involve youth from other parts of Sri Lanka.

We are offering scholarships to our graduates so they can go onto University or vocational studies. And we are using the grant to fund core staff positions and activities, which is even more critical in context of Sri Lanka’s collapsing economy.

Supporting and investing in critical staff who offer the long-term leadership to our program (who themselves came from vulnerable or marginalized communities) is an important piece the vitality of our program. And it’s power.

Here is a short video with Darshan Ambalavanar talking about our program and how we think about it.

We are very proud of many people and many things:1000 migrant children each year are given standardized testing to continue their schooling, 400 students graduate each year from our vocational training program in Thailand and Myanmar, 41 students graduate from university each year in Thailand.

70 local partner organizations are in our network across Myanmar and Thailand, 12 years ago we started working and never stopped, 7 years we’ve spent lobbying the Thai and Myanmar governments until they formed a working group to allow migrant children to attend any school, 6 social enterprises have been launched by our graduates in remote areas, 4 generations of people are impacted when we deliver vocational training to one woman, and 3 educational policies have been developed by us that have become law in Thailand and Myanmar.

Our most recent Move92 grant was to help us address the COVID crises in the migrant communities here. This meant building online networks to help distribute food and coordinate resources to keep women-led social enterprises open. We delivered supplies like masks and sanitizing equipment and created a distribution channels to get them to people in remote areas. We got accurate information out to factory workers, and set up watch-dog reporting to make sure that our most vulnerable were monitored and supported against discrimination during this crisis.

Doing all these things were not exactly within our “educational” mission, but they were things needed to be done. And we had the relationships of trust to make these things happen.

Here are two videos that will give you a better sense of the people we are dedicated to: